Saturday, 4 October 2008

Why Formula 1 is boring and what we can gain from it.

You may have seen the recent Grand Prix on television....You did? And you fell asleep? Thought so. Dull huh? But what does it have to do with Moneyspyder and why?

There are so many reasons but there is one main reason we can learn from and make use of: the precision with which the teams race now pretty much ensures they know what the result will be bar any accidents or freak weather. With 20 or so cars flying around a track at over 200mph how can they be so certain of the outcome? These are pretty complex pieces of machinery after all! Be great if we could be so certain about the outcome of our businesses, huh?

thing is, the science of Formula 1 has been applied to the measurement of key performance indicators on racing cars enabling the teams to know to the nearest 10th of a second how well the car is performing against expectations set by a mathematical model of what should be possible.

Sounding familiar yet? Think about an internet retail site; What sort of bounce rate, conversion rate, daily unique visitors, email open rate, basket abandonment rate, etc. etc. is expected? How does current site performance measure against the expectation? How are these expectations set? In a similar way to Formula one cars funnily enough.

By now, you should be saying 'yeah yeah, I have Google Analytics. So what?'. If you aren't saying this please call Moneyspyder now! So you dohave Google Analytics (GA)? Are you able to measure your site performance to an adequate level of precision? Are you confident in the accuracy of your data?

Recently we've seen a fair amount of GA data with a broad spectrum of precision and quality of data. To get any value from GA it is fundamentally important to get clean and precise data on which to base our expectations and indeed any subsequent measurement.

For example, customers arriving on your (all important) landing pages from marketing emails will probably arrive with a url payload:

http://yoursite.com/email=abc123

Now, each email is likely to have a different value associated with it. How is this going to manifest itself in your GA reports? Your landing page usage measurement will be totally useless if you measure each unique request based on unique url's.

'Course, You don't have to be on the Moneyspyder platform to get quality GA data...but it helps! The quality of your analytics data will define the quality of you analysis and how much trust you can place in it. Treat you online business to a bit of Formula one style accuracy - give us a call.

Moneyspyder

MoneySpyder: develops and hosts state-of-the-art e-commerce sites and continuously improves the customer experience using web analytics, split-testing and regular site enhancements. We think of it more as a partnership rather than simply a service.

E-Commerce Services: leading edge technology and a guaranteed commitment of time and expertise, week on week, to improve your e-commerce site.